WTF? Ezra Klein is blaming "old people" for deficit [View all]

[99th_Monkey]

Has Mr. Klein been swilling Tea Party KoolAid on the sly? This is disgusting.
The entire tone of this article is chillingly ageist and hugely misleading.

To try to cover his heartless ass, Klein even admits in the fine print at end of
article that rising health care costs ARE indeed a huge problem, after spending
the entire article torturing and tweaking data suggesting otherwise; i.e. laying
the blame squarely at the feet of US having "too many old people".


What does Mr. Klein suggest we do about having too many "old people"?
Either he's setting the stage for euthanizing everyone over 70, OR he's simply
blowing rainbows up the ass of the 1%, giving them cover for cutting SS and
Medicare benefits. Either way, it's a very ugly picture.

FUCK YOU EZRA KLEIN!!

PS - to see his graphs, you'll need to use the link, as they didn't copy/paste
with the text.

Our coming deficits are driven by old people, not health inflation
by Ezra Klein * March 20, 2013

You’ve heard — perhaps on this very blog! — that our long-term deficits are almost entirely driven by health-care costs. That’s true over the next 50, 60, 70 years, which is, absurdly, the time frame people often talk in. But over the next 20 years, it’s not quite right.

A more accurate way to put it would be that in the coming decades, new spending is almost entirely driven by health-care programs. But what’s really driving the spending in those programs is the aging of the population, not the rise in health-care costs. Over at the Concord Coalition’s blog, Joshua Gordon makes this point in an unusually clear way — by which I mean, of course, with graphs.

Here’s a breakdown of new spending by program between 2012 and 2037. As you can see, Medicare and Medicaid far outpace Social Security, and all programs that are not Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security are expected to shrink as a percentage of the economy:

There are two reasons health-care programs could be spending more. One is that health-care costs are going up. The other is that more people are using them. We typically talk about the problem as if the problem is rising costs. But over the next 20 years, the cost increases are driven by more people.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/20/our-coming-deficits-are-driven-by-old-people-not-health-inflation/?wprss=rss_ezra-klein&wpisrc=nl_wonk